Tile Roof Repair
A large share of tile repairs start with somebody else's boots. Tile carries weight only in certain places — the head of the tile, the batten, the overlap with the course below — and a foot set down in the wrong third of a tile cracks it, sometimes without a sound. The satellite installer, the solar crew, the gutter cleaner and the pressure-washing service all walk tile roofs, and few of them know where the support is. Months later a stain appears on a ceiling and the roof gets blamed for something that was done to it. So the first piece of advice on this page has nothing to do with roofing: nobody goes up on your tile roof without knowing how the profile carries load and without walk boards to spread their weight across it.
The second thing to understand is that a leaking tile roof is usually not a worn-out roof. In most cases the tiles are in fine condition and something below them, or beside them, has given way. Diagnosis takes patience, because water can enter at one point, travel along a batten or a rafter, and appear in a room some distance from where it got in. Lifting tiles to follow the path is normal and unavoidable work, and any repair that begins by squeezing sealant into the nearest visible gap is guessing.
What actually fails
Cracked and chipped tiles from impact or foot traffic. Slipped tiles where a fastener corroded or a mortar bed let go, most often at hips and ridges where the wind loads are highest. Debris packed into valleys, damming water that should be running away and holding it against the membrane until it finds a lap. Flashing that has corroded, or that was never formed properly where the roof meets a wall or a chimney. And underneath all of it, the underlayment: dried out, torn, or simply worn through after years of heat, which is the one failure that changes the shape of the whole conversation. Hail contributes too, and it takes more of it than most owners expect — flat concrete tile begins fracturing at around an inch and a quarter of stone diameter, while high-profile S tile holds out closer to two inches, because the arch carries the impact down into the tile beneath. Along the coast, damage often traces to a single named storm; the National Weather Service's hurricane safety material covers what wind-driven rain does to a roof's edges and openings, which is where tile roofs tend to lose water rather than in the middle of a slope.
Spot repair, or lift and relay
This is the decision that matters on tile, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch. If a handful of tiles are broken and the membrane around them is still sound and flexible, a spot repair is the right and inexpensive fix, and it will hold for years. But once the underlayment has aged out, patching individual leaks becomes a treadmill: each repair holds while the next weak area opens somewhere else, and the money goes out in small amounts that never add up to a solution. The proper answer then is a relay. Tiles are removed carefully and stacked, broken pieces set aside, a new membrane goes down over a repaired deck, and the original tiles go back on with replacements only where needed. It is a substantial project and it is not cheap, but it buys decades more roof without buying new tile, which is why it is usually the better economics on a roof whose covering is still sound.
How do you tell which one you are looking at without taking the roof apart? Three signals. How old is the underlayment, not the tile — if nobody knows, that is itself informative. How many separate leaks have appeared in the last few years, and were they in the same area or scattered? And what does the membrane look like where tiles are lifted at the leak: still pliable, or brittle and cracking when it is handled? A repair scoped from photographs of those conditions is a decision. One scoped from the ground is a guess with an invoice attached.
Finding tiles that match
Manufacturers retire lines, and two decades of weather move a tile well away from anything on a supplier's shelf. The work-arounds are current equivalents, salvage stock, and any spares stored on the property when the roof went on — which is the strongest argument for ordering spares on installation day. Where a match is imperfect, new pieces go on the least visible slope and sound original tiles move to the face of the building. Told about that trade-off up front, most owners find it easy to accept; discovered afterwards, it is a complaint. Either way, resist the urge to send anyone up with a tube of sealant when a stain appears. Sealing the wrong thing hides the problem for one season and costs you the next.
